Yassine Balbzioui flew to Sardinia directly from Marseilles where he attended an artist residency at La Friche la Belle de Mai.
Yassine already knew Sardinia and Cherimus very well: in 2011 he collaborated on the project Happy April, creating workshops throughout the Sulcis-Iglesiente area with Marco Colombaioni; in 2013 we worked together in the towns of Masainas, Giba, Villaperuccio, Perdaxius and Piscinas for the project La biblioteca fantastica; and in 2015 he was with us in the Sant’Elia’s neighborhood in Cagliari for the Sardinian part of the project Côte À Côte, begun the year before in Rabat, Morocco.
Primarily a painter, Yassine Balbzioui uses sculpture, installation and performance in his practice, spreading a visionary and playful force with both hands that encourages the observer to recalibrate their relationship with the world.
After the work of collecting and developing key ideas for the parks carried out with Dragos Olea of Apparatus 22, Yassine set his work on the physical development of the various projects that emerged. He wanted to immerse himself in the four parks by accepting the “utopian challenge”, as the artist calls it, that the project I giardini possibili proposes: a transformation that really starts with children, not as a pretext but as a foundation.
The classrooms were thus emptied of their benches and transformed from time to time into a wall to decorate and knock down, a dense maze of drawings of fountains, an infinite line with which the body must relate and dance, a large scale model made of moss, clay, chalk and paint—almost a science fiction crèche.
Ideas have been thrust into form, gesture, leap, and fall. The materials were mixed in order to become inextricable, and in this way, possibilities were unleashed and ultimately freed.
Thanks to Yassine Balbzioui, “I giardini possibili“ have traveled much: they too have become living and fluttering creatures.
